> Buying tokens is about as pay-to-win as it gets.
This assumes the people with the money know what to do with those tokens. But they don't! The people with the money are very good with making more money, but they do not know what to build or how to build it. Which is why they pay other people to do so.
They had the capital needed to pay for everything, however, so they called the shots, and we're used to thinking that's how it will always be. But AI upends things.
Now, there is a future where AI gets powerful enough to essentially become a genie that grants wishes exactly as you imagined them without terrible unintended consequences. At that point, we've basically hit the singularity and (by definition) all bets are off.
The other, currently more realistic, future is where AI gets very good but is still fallible. There will still be a need for highly skilled and creative people to guide AI. That is us. And tokens are incredibly cheap, considering how good even local models are.
We only have to realize the power that is now available to us to reach out and grasp it: the ability to create value without capital.
Value Is strictly related to scarcity. Something that everybody can do or have (with or without AI btw) has no intrinsic value.
Digital goods generally speaking do have marginal cost zero.. so they do not have a real value.
Land is scarse so valuable.. (Land on Mars could help reduce this scarcity )
Food can be scarce, especially when we thrash It, because we do not want the price to fall
So an economic theory based about "more" abundant resources instead of scarcity or where the production costs are marginally zero (thanks to fusion based electricity, and drones/humanoids and AI) has to be developed..
But what about the shared vision?
"Liberte', egalite', fraternite'" ?
Yes, a new economic system will have to be devised for an era of abundance, although I think that is still quite a ways away, even with an AI-accelerated timeline. (Robots and abundant compute and unlimited energy will be severely constrained by logistics for a long time yet.) But on this point I think there is some nuance:
> Value Is strictly related to scarcity.
Value is extremely subjective. Trivial example, going for a hike in a park is effectively free and unlimited and many people enjoy it.
Monetizing that value may require scarcity though. (There are surely exceptions, but I can't think of any offhand.) To extend the example above, that's when you put a fence and an entry fee around the park.
That's why I said AI lets you create value without capital. Creating wealth out of that value is left as an exercise for the reader ;-)
This assumes the people with the money know what to do with those tokens. But they don't! The people with the money are very good with making more money, but they do not know what to build or how to build it. Which is why they pay other people to do so.
They had the capital needed to pay for everything, however, so they called the shots, and we're used to thinking that's how it will always be. But AI upends things.
Now, there is a future where AI gets powerful enough to essentially become a genie that grants wishes exactly as you imagined them without terrible unintended consequences. At that point, we've basically hit the singularity and (by definition) all bets are off.
The other, currently more realistic, future is where AI gets very good but is still fallible. There will still be a need for highly skilled and creative people to guide AI. That is us. And tokens are incredibly cheap, considering how good even local models are.
We only have to realize the power that is now available to us to reach out and grasp it: the ability to create value without capital.